This is the joint website of Women Against Rape and Black Women's Rape Action Project. Both organisations are based on self-help and provide support, legal information and advocacy. We campaign for justice and protection for all women and girls, including asylum seekers, who have suffered sexual, domestic and/or racist violence.

WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women. BWRAP was founded in 1991. It focuses on getting justice for women of colour, bringing out the particular discrimination they face. It has prevented the deportation of many rape survivors. Both organisations are multiracial.

In the Media

Left: Sian Evans and Flavia Titti in front of the Immigration Tribunal

Ivana Davidovic
WVoN co-editor

Flavia Titti has not seen her children since a fateful day in 2002 when she was forced to flee Rwanda in order to save her life and, as she believed then, the lives of her three children whom she left with a trusted family friend.

What she thought would be a short-term separation has turned into a protracted Kafkaesque agony.

Breastfed baby taken from mother for six days, a move she says trust denied her right to challenge

Karen McVeigh
guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 June 2011 18.42 BST

A breastfeeding mother whose newborn baby was forcibly taken from her and put into care for six days is seeking a judicial review over alleged unlawful treatment during a crucial bonding period with her daughter.

Verna Joseph, who has a history of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, says she was pushed to the ground, restrained by security guards, and her baby taken in full public view during a scuffle at King George hospital in Redbridge to which police were called.

She was then transferred by ambulance to Goodmayes hospital, North-East London NHS foundation trust, in Ilford, but was not told until several hours later that she was being compulsorily admitted for an assessment under the Mental Health Act.

Ken Clarke's comments, were arrogant and ignorant. It took us 15 years of campaigning to get the law to recognise that rape in marriage is a crime, that sex without consent is rape whatever the relationship with the attacker. The injury and suffering that
result are not less just because you know your assailant. It was also outrageous of Clarke to mix up consenting sex between teenagers with rape.
The sentence for a supposed false allegation of rape is three or four years - more than the Justice Secretary appears to want now as the punishment for some rape.
Reducing the prison population is a laudable aim but why not cut sentences for non-violent offences? 70 per cent of prisoners are there for non-violent crimes. Over 60 per cent of women prisoners are mothers, the majority jailed for crimes of poverty such as petty theft or sex work.

A detective investigating sexual assaults was devastated when he himself was raped. But he grew even more angry when police colleagues insisted on investigating the crime. Here he tells his tale anonymously
by Amelia Hill guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 April 2011

I've been a police officer for two decades and a detective, specialising in serious crime and sexual offences, for 15 years. Never once in all the time I've investigated these horrific crimes has it occurred to me that one day I would be a victim; that I would be raped – and that I would refuse to help the police investigate.